It is difficult to overstate the tremendous impact of Edward Said's Orientalism on the various fields of the humanities in Western academia.1 Said's wide-ranging, profound, and multidisciplinary critique of the ways in which the triumphant culture of our times, the Western one from the Enlightenment to the present, has encountered, codified, and represented the culture of its most immediate other, the Islamic Orient, opened the door for all repressed cultures to question their received representation and to deconstruct the discourse that produced it over time.2 This has led to the revolution in the humanities that we identify today as postcolonial criticism, a revolution that was a long time coming, but Orientalism, and the charismatic personality of its author, provided the catalyst around which its diverse strands finally coalesced.3

Even today, forty years after the book's publication, and despite sustained denunciation from detractors on the right and left alike, Said's fundamental critique of the political and ideological frames of knowledge in general, and knowledge about Islam in particular, still reverberates across academia worldwide. Entire domains of inquiry into the cultural production of both the colonizing and colonized worlds, as well as all marginalized minority groups and their sometimes amiable but mostly confrontational interaction, have found their ways into curricula and university programs in the West and in the postcolonial world.4 They have all benefited from the trail blazed by Said's Orientalism and his subsequent elaborations on the intersection between empire (as both locus of power and representation) and culture and the role of intellectuals in our extremely divided yet thoroughly interconnected world.5 In fact, as Anne Wagner, the prominent historian of nineteenth-century art, told me thirty years ago, scholars in the humanities cannot avoid the “post-Saidian” epistemological milieu in which they have to labor regardless …